Health and Wellbeing
Parenting: Simple Ideas for Championing Empathy over Punishment
Respond to your child's difficult behaviour by meeting the feeling behind it, instead of reaching for another sticker chart or consequence.
- 53 minutes
- Recorded webinar
- Certificate
Members
Parent membership: all 50 courses for parents and carers, £40 a year or £4 a month after 14 days free.
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What you'll learn
- Use emotional commentary to calm your child by naming what you see
- Share feelings with your child instead of rushing to reassure them
- Accept your own reactions so you can respond calmly, not on impulse
- Help your child put things right after something goes wrong
- Balance your child's needs and your own by protecting the relationship
About this course
You've taken the tablet away, tried grounding and star charts, and nothing much has changed. For a lot of children, especially those who've been through trauma, rewards and punishments miss whatever is driving the behaviour.
Empathic behaviour management works on that instead. It comes from a clinical psychologist who has spent 20 years with the families of children who've had a traumatic start, and its most useful tool is emotional commentary. Start by just saying what you see ("you're so angry"), then add a gentle "I wonder if..." when it feels safe. You'll also learn to share your child's joy rather than praise it, and to help them put things right after a blow-up.
It starts with you, though. Accepting your own bad days, and knowing what calms you down, makes the rest possible.
Recording
Open in order
- 47 min
Webinar Playback
- 7 min
Q&A